COASTAL HERITAGE VOLUME 17, NUMBER 3 WINTER 2002-03 THE FREEWAY City WINTER 2002-03 • 1 CONTENTS 3 THE FREEWAY CITY The South—where sprawl is king and where spread-out growth accelerates faster and farther than anywhere else. Coastal Heritage is a quarterly publication of the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, a university- based network supporting research, education, 13 and outreach to conserve coastal resources and enhance economic opportunity for the people CAN “SMART-GROWTH” TECHNIQUES of South Carolina. Comments regarding this or WORK IN SOUTH CAROLINA? future issues of Coastal Heritage are welcomed. Many obstacles remain to denser development patterns. Subscriptions are free upon request by contacting: S.C. Sea Grant Consortium 287 Meeting Street 14 Charleston, S.C. 29401 phone: (843) 727-2078 EBBS AND FLOWS e-mail: [email protected] Executive Director M. Richard DeVoe ON THE COVER Interstate 85, which cuts through upstate South Carolina, forms part of the freeway spine Director of Communications Linda Blackwell of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Raleigh, North Carolina megalopolis. PHOTO/WADE SPEES Editor John H. Tibbetts Art Director Patty Snow Contributing Writer Susan Ferris Board of Directors The Consortium’s Board of Directors is composed of the chief executive officers of its member institutions: Dr. Ronald R. Ingle, Chair President, Coastal Carolina University James F. Barker President, Clemson University SAFE HAVEN. The Honorable Ernest A. Finney, Jr. To limit sprawl and protect Interim President, S.C. State University wildlife, governments should purchase valuable lands Dr. Raymond Greenberg outright and encourage President, Medical University of South Carolina property owners to establish Major General John S. Grinalds easements that prevent President, The Citadel development, conservationists Leo I. Higdon, Jr. PHOTO/WADE SPEES say. President, College of Charleston Dr. Paul A. Sandifer Executive Director S.C. Department of Natural Resources Dr. Andrew Sorensen COPYRIGHT © 2002 by the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium. All rights reserved. President, University of South Carolina 2 • COASTAL HERITAGE THE FREEWAY City Is sprawl outsmarting “smart growth”? CAR TREK. Like many other South Carolinians, Jon Boettcher commutes long-distance to work each day, primarily along four-lane highways. PHOTO/WADE SPEES By John H. Tibbetts outherners are building a new kind of city, the After World War II, suburban tentacles reached semi-rustic megalopolis, hundreds of miles into new territory and then filled in with develop- S long. Researchers have found this startling land- ment. Giant cities grew in spurts that, over decades, use pattern spreading across the Carolinas and other could be measured like rings on a tree, with first- and southern states where bits and pieces of sprawl blend second- and third-ring suburbs. Until the 1960s, most together along major freeways. suburban workers commuted to the urban core where “We’ve become aware of development that is not business and industry still flourished. really urbanization” in the traditional sense, says Ralph Starting in the 1980s, some outlying suburbs Heimlich, an agricultural economist with the U.S. bloomed into “edge cities,” a term coined by author Department of Agriculture (USDA). “Particularly in the Joel Garreau. Suburban office towers and corporate South, you’re seeing growth and development that has no campuses got mixed with cineplexes and mega-malls center.” The South, in fact, has become a trendsetter in and car dealerships. Edge cities became the new the “deconcentration” of American life—the scattering of business centers after jobs fled urban cores and inner- people, homes, and businesses across the landscape. ring suburbs. Until 1950, the typical American city included a What distinguishes edge cities is that everybody dense urban core dominated by factories and tall drives everywhere. commercial buildings built around seaports and river Conservationists and social activists have con- landings and railroad depots. The urban core was ringed demned sprawl—low-density, car-dependent develop- by tightly knit suburbs, which in turn were surrounded ment—for harming the environment and for leaving by open countryside. city dwellers behind in decaying urban cores. Sprawling WINTER 2002-03 • 3 development chews up wildlife Georgetown area along Highway 17. habitat, damages air and water And the Charleston metro area will quality, and paves over farmland and eventually spread west along I-26 to other open space, conservationists say. connect with Orangeburg, creating a Sprawl is expensive, costing taxpayers 60-mile-long city, according to a recent billions to build extended roads and computer model. water and sewer infrastructure. Such vast tissues of development Yet, despite its harmful legacy, have emerged partly because of massive sprawl is stretching beyond edge investments in major freeways. The Sprawl inevitable? cities, creating a new urban form, 44,000-mile Dwight D. Eisenhower which gains energy from its spine— System of Interstate and Defense Is sprawl in your future? Probably. “Urban sprawl is more or less the four- or six- or eight- or even Highways, initiated in 1956, was the inevitable unless it runs up against ten-lane freeway. Across the South, world’s biggest public-works project an immovable barrier” like the ocean development sprouts from highways ever. The system was designed to move or a steep mountain range, says Rutherford Platt, a planning professor like leaves from a tree limb. “Today, goods, farm produce, and military at the University of Massachusetts. the nerve center of the metropolitan supplies. But it also soon formed the Witold Rybczynski, a professor of area is the highway, not the center backbone of the nation’s highway urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, has said that America city,” says Robert F. commuting system. does not have a future of very Becker, director of ROBERT F. BECKER In 1960, Daniel compact towns. It’s impractical to Clemson Patrick Moynihan, hope for greater densities in most urban areas, because “it’s not how University’s Strom then a university we live.” The solutions to spread-out Thurmond Institute “Today, the nerve professor and later U.S. growth, moreover, “are pretty tough: of Government & senator from New York, they either involve raising the cost of predicted that the gas by a factor of two, or imposing Public Affairs. “This center of the restrictions on private property. And is more of a linear interstate network neither of these things is likely.” development metropolitan area would transform urban Author Suzannah Lessard also pattern than we’ve America: “Highways believes that fighting sprawl is futile. Instead, “we must first accept seen before.” is the highway, not determine land use, sprawl’s fundamental legitimacy—its Arcing through which is another way inevitability—as a form” of develop- the southern the center city.” of saying they settle the ment, she writes in a recent essay. In researching a book on land use, piedmont, growth future of the areas in Lessard began to realize that “visibly along interstates has which they are built.” or invisibly, sprawl was everywhere. It knit together the Without proper was the shaping force in our landscape. It was the ascendant, Atlanta metro area, small towns and planning, Moynihan argued, highways determining place form of our time.” mid-sized cities and their suburbs, would draw people and businesses to Rybczynksi has called for improved plus rural areas populated by long- the suburbs, and split and disrupt older planning, returning suburbs to a nineteenth century ideal of a “much distance commuters, into “a huge urban neighborhoods. more . green, country environ- countrified city across a vast space,” Yet no one in 1960 could have ment.” in the words of Robert E. Lang, anticipated that Americans at the turn An ecologically benign sprawl? Is it possible to create spread-out director of the Metropolitan Institute of the twenty-first century would build suburban communities—places of at Virginia Tech. This 600-mile-long homes so far into the countryside and elegance, open space, fresh air, megalopolis stretches along the I-20, commute such distances via freeways. trees—that won’t harm the wider Federal and state governments have environment with auto emissions and I-85, and I-40 corridors from runoff pollution? “This is happening Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Raleigh, spent vast sums improving highway at the micro-scale in some develop- North Carolina, including the South systems, largely for commuters’ benefit, ments and in some of the better Carolina metro areas of Anderson, over the past forty years. planned communities,” says Timothy Beatley, an associate professor of Greenville, and Spartanburg. “A generation ago, a 60-mile urban and environmental planning at Another sprawling agglomera- commute on a two-lane road seemed the University of Virginia. “But tion is starting to fill in along 150 very long,” says Michael T. Ratcliffe, a certainly on the larger regional scale it’s very, very hard.” miles of interstate and U.S. freeways geographer with the U.S. Census from Augusta, Georgia, to Florence, Bureau. “But now on a limited-access S.C. Meanwhile, the Myrtle Beach highway it’s easier. We are seeing rings metro area is bleeding southward, of settlement within an hour’s commute linking up with growth from the of the metropolitan edge. These 4 • COASTAL HERITAGE LOADING ZONE. Americans continue to avoid mass transit and increasingly drive alone to work. Slightly less than five percent of Americans commuted to work via public transportation in 2000, a modest decrease from a decade earlier. Nearly 76 percent of Americans drove alone in their cars in 2000, up from 73 percent in 1990. PHOTO/WADE SPEES WINTER 2002-03 • 5 CLOSE QUARTERS. A number of subdivisions are being built according to “smart-growth” principles, including narrower streets and smaller lots, which some say could reduce sprawl’s impact on the rural landscape. But the vast majority of these subdivisions remain as car-dependent as conventional sprawl.